ILL. SEEKS FED ACTION TO PROTECT ETHANOL SALES

WASHINGTON -- Illinois lawmakers are stepping up pressure on the Clinton administration to revamp new clean air rules that jeopardize gasohol sales in the Chicago area, the largest U.S. market for the politically potent, corn-based alternative fuel.

Unsatisfied by reassurances from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), senators and Downstate congressmen re-cently underscored their concerns in a letter to President Clinton and in a meeting they arranged between White House Chief of Staff John Podesta and the Illinois Corn Growers Assn.

"To date, the Environmental Protection Agency seems content to avoid the problem," the letter says. "This problem is simply too important to Illinois and to the ethanol industry to ignore."

In Chicago and eight other highly polluted cities, gasoline must be blended with ethanol or some other high-oxygen additive to make the fuel burn more cleanly in automobiles.

Outside of Illinois -- where politicians and their corn-farming constituents have made ethanol the additive of choice -- most reformulated gasoline (RFG) is blended with an oxygen-rich petroleum byproduct called MTBE, which is cheaper and slower to evaporate than ethanol.

The problem is that ethanol, which makes up 10% of gasohol, evaporates too quickly to meet the new standard, especially in the summer. And the oil industry complains that the cost of using different additives for different seasons would be prohibitive.

However, in a March 12 letter to Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., EPA administrator Carol Browner wrote that "major refiners that supply the Chicago and Milwaukee RFG markets have indicated they plan to continue using ethanol."

But in order for gasohol to meet the standard year-round, refiners would have to produce gasoline in the summer that evaporates much more slowly.

Refiners are worried that the EPA will require such lower-vapor gasoline to preserve the viability of ethanol, noting that the new rules kick in shortly after the deadline for candidates to file for the Illinois presidential primary.